“Yauch”

A quick little can-do for Adam Yauch. Again.

The Perpetual Vortex Of Guilt and Violence

An Ideal Of Perfection

This time I started with a title because I knew exactly what I wanted to write. In the 20 minutes I was awake this morning, I felt guilt for exactly 3 actions. Three entirely different circumstances made me feel remorse, regret or anxiety about how they’d affect something separate from me.

The first was guilt about having to defecate. Each morning after I awake I urinate and sometimes defecate. My partner is getting ready for work, spending a little time in the bathroom before I’m there, tending to her face and hair. She leaves to get dressed and it’s my opportunity to get in and relieve a long night’s dream of activity, violence and excitement with visceral expulsion. I’m happily sitting on the toilet, debating whether I should remain in a headstrong state because the dreams of last night involved violence toward some bad people, or read about paleo-fitness and inspire a run and maybe more. Then I hear a gentle knock and a not-so-subtle, “Are you pooping?” The question doesn’t bother me, but I’ve heard it before. The tone is what gets to me, as do the two or three times last week the question was asked, leading all the way to the argument about pre-partner-preparation aromatization of the bathroom. I feel guilt about shitting.

The next bout of guilt was a few minutes later. On most, cold mornings I head outside 5 minutes before leaving to drop my partner at work and warm the car. I made it downstairs and opened the curtains, adding some light to a rather dark room and rousing a listless house. I was five minutes early so I sat looking out the window at my trash and recyclable bins waiting to be dumped, the vast array of speeding cars getting to and from school or work, and the few distant runners still encouraging me to shower, put running shoes on and head out for a jog. Yes, I’d wear shorts, a shirt or maybe two, socks, and maybe a hat and gloves. But no, I decided to have eggs and sausage for breakfast which cancels out early morning activity. Tangent. Anyway, I’m sitting and waiting for 8:15 to flash when my partner comes downstairs. She’s getting her lunch ready, checking her belongings – phone, wallet, ID tag – and I head to the kitchen to get a little closer to her before she’s gone for 8 hours. Oh, by the way, she asked if the bathroom stunk when I exited it, but at this point I didn’t hold it against her. As we’re standing at the table, she gives me a straight look, a look that makes me feel I have to do something for her to make amends, and says the “dog poop bags broke while I picked up gooey, slimy, soft shit.” Her hand went through the bag. How was I to take that? You have to understand something about my partner. Her nonverbal gestures, most expressively her facial gestures, reveal everything about her state. For years she’s denied I can’t gain anything about her emotions from them, but they’re just so damn revealing. Being early, and after the whole defecation thing, I snapped a bit. Not mean, but said ‘what am I supposed to do about it?’ She then continued on, maybe realizing it wasn’t my fault and I played along, testing a bag by sticking my hand in and opening it up to create a double-ended, opened sleeve. Just knot one side, right? Well, I felt some guilt there.

At this point in the 15 minutes of being awake, life is fairly good. Nothing too extreme has happened, and by that I mean no major arguments or voice-raising antics. But I’m starting to let it build without even knowing. It’s time to leave, we’ve made it into the car and brought along our female dog for the ride. She never goes alone, if ever getting out of bed in the morning to see us off. With the male, it’s much different. As I begin to back out of the driveway, just passing a young, urban-dressed pedestrian and pull onto the road heading to the hospital, I look into the rearview mirror and make a comment about him checking out the house. I also say I didn’t lock the door. Immediate panic is created. I shouldn’t have said anything because now we’re in a Q&A about security and how I should lock the door, but I never do because it’s inconvenient when I’ll only be gone a few minutes, but it’s insisted upon, or rather commanded that I lock the door from now on. And this is when I give a quick burst. I say ‘I don’t need to be lectured to.’ And my partner keeps going, and I say ‘That’s it, I’m done.’ It’s a habit I’ve begun to to indulge in, trying to stop conversations which will turn into arguments by saying ‘I’m done’. My partner is good at silent treatment but I can’t be silent. I have to declare the conversation won’t progress anymore. We get to the hospital, I drop her off, she said “bye” and I said ‘I’ll see you later,’ all with the intentional air of anger. We’ll have the whole day to get over it, but it should’ve never happened and I feel guilty. I’m writing this.

 Three incidents in 20 minutes. Part me, part her. But honestly, many days it’s like a vortex of guilt, like I’m being jacked in the face each time I circle toward a new moment, the whizzing and twirling of my brain and accompanying sidekick of a mind continually being pummeled by an arch-nemesis. Over the last few days I began making strides to change myself for the better and the always. One of my tasks is to be more honest about how I feel. I’ve tried it in the past but didn’t have the temperament or patience to pull it off demurely. I think I can now, but I want to rush to the heavy stuff right away. For instance, my guilt about sexuality or the addictive trait. I want to deal with addiction myself but opened a fortune cookie yesterday saying, “A beautiful person is with you, confide your problems.” The first statement is decidedly correct, but I hesitate to confide my problems. I have many, one of which is having guilt for behaviors I do, which are being, and don’t enact, which should be becoming. Another is about sex. I have to fix it myself, I want to be completely honest, yet I understand how well my partner and I express insufficiencies to each other. Not well. I can’t lay blame, but she lives with an ideal of perfection I’ve never been a part of and my issues run violently deep.

I feel much better about my predicament. I feel ok concealing particular aspects of self-change and having to make up excuses later. I’m ok dealing with a problem when it arises rather than stemming the tide of perpetual happiness tainted with brief cresting. These are never longterm issues if faced now, and I’m facing them now, or at least adjusting traits most healthy and unhealthy to cater to a presumptive, ideal perfection. I can work toward that as long as I can be sure not to dismiss the nitty gritty. I was born into nitty gritty and want to die in the dirtiest, filthiest examples of human life. From a distance, of course, and with nothing but guilt for thinking about doing it.

Fickle Or Parallel?

Does it matter where heart resides anymore?

Yu-Xa!

With more than water falling…

The Careless Many

Yu-xa For A Friend: 2/21

A friend of mine died yesterday and yu-xa, or eye water, falls.*

She didn’t survive surgery following a car crash on what I expect to be the icy or snowy conditions of a mountain pass. While this should be about her, I want to respect her life so I’ll express a little more about how I feel. It’s been nearly 14 years since a friend of mine has left all who know them. I can say I knew her, if only expressed as the few months we lived in the same city, the few times we chatted about life and ourselves, or the time I was invited over for dinner. There are people immediately and deeply connective, and her and her family are those people.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about finding out. At first I wasn’t shocked, instead absorbing the feelings my partner was exuding. She was shocked and saddened, and I was recruited to support her. We both listened to the phone message she’d received late last night from a mutual friend, and I wanted to be talkative after hearing it. I wanted to and did say how wrong it felt that our friend was gone. It wasn’t until my partner left the room to continue prepping for work that tears were shed. How could someone I know, yet so young, die? How are her husband and daughter going to handle her death? Now, truly reflecting on it, tears are flowing. Her daughter wasn’t even a year old. They still needed to have another child in order to make a son the fourth in a line. On learning of her death, I felt for my partner first, then for my friend’s family next.

I know life may have not been easy for her. She was a 40 hour-a-week working mom and social servant. She designed her own successful, outreach programs while feeding and nurturing the most beautiful, calm little girl. While their daughter’s “lovable forgiveness” had become their life, there was still passion between husband and wife. A child changes the romance, but they appeared to take it in stride, holding hands along the way.

I don’t know if this is supposed to be an exercise on mortality; if I’m supposed to consider why life can be so short, or how important each moment is. I do feel that, but not because of her death. Not right now. More than anything I’m conjuring tears and sadness, looking for a deeper connection to her now that she’s gone. A heartfelt relationship was starting and I’d been drawn back to their family on several occasions since moving to another place. Maybe I don’t fully accept the circumstance yet because I can’t be around those who’ve know her years longer and are grieving wholeheartedly. Once in that place, there would be nothing I could do to stop showing my love for her and her family.

I was hoping to be scared of death. On the drive to drop my partner off at work, there was a moment I considered myself dead. It wasn’t frightful and I wasn’t concerned about my loss to others, but then again, I’m still living and still hoping, even if just for the moment, just for my friend. I’ve been drawn to death my whole life, threatened it with the utmost lack of common sense. I’ve attempted to kill life – my own, other people and other animals. Some have succeeded in dying because of me, but I can’t call it success when I feel void at the loss of my friend. I can’t feel either relief or despair. It’s as if I’m waiting for something. Maybe I want to do something for her family. Maybe I expect to play a bigger role. Maybe I sit here and consider how invaluable I am and that her death brings me closer to no one, especially my vital self. It’s shameful that death inspires what I consider the soberest words from me in months. I’m ashamed for not being there to see her one last time.

It’s a darker day than usual. I retain negation and reality, but today I’m drunk with impulse. She has intoxicated me with awareness at the cost of life. I’m stretching and reaching for more, asking for more from her before her soul has been diminished into the hearts and minds of the one’s closest to her. I want to catch her before it sets in, before the physicality of body removes any ethereal remnant of a woman I shared a frame with. I’ve got to catch her now before the heartache dissipates into remedy and resolution. I can’t bear to imagine the face of her lover, her husband. I can’t bear to feel the empty sense her daughter will develop, left by the missing touch. I can’t hear how the cries will carry once the stories are rehashed and distributed because she was loved and embraced. The sadness will build in my throat but she will turn it into a smile. Her face will flash between each word and pause it takes to explain how she makes me feel. She’s really not yet gone and if anything, I’ll imagine her face as long as my eyes and awareness can be kept away from the careless many. She and I aren’t one of them today.

We learn nothing. Death can creep rather close to the ones we love, but we learn to value less while they’re here. We banter and retort, argue and yell as incendiaries, yet there’s something which remains to be spoken by us. The mild acceptance of one another’s grieving goes unchecked as the pain of death is directed inwards. There’s anxiety ad naseum because we can’t stop it. But we’re anything less than careless and she was everything more than caring.

* In some feat of reverence, I began researching the origin of her daughter’s name, tracing it to Japanese and “forgiveness” as she had mentioned, or Ghanaian and “lovable”. I found it’s exact spelling in Athabaskan as the suffix for Eel River clans and in a Nicaraguan tribe, the Hokan, as part of the word for raccoon, s-kaiya. Also in the Hokan language, I came across the word yu-xa, meaning “eye water” or “tear” and it’s appropriate now.

IDK Where The Hole (And) [In] My Heart (Are) [Is]!

The Truth of the Matter…

Xeriology, My Friend!

Neomission in the old-school classic…

Her Lover’s Flaming-Tossing Canvas-Smearing

She used what was left to appease the rather common need…

She Red Bloody Messy

Her Lovers

The blade dripping with thick, oozing layers of red, maroon and pink wasn’t enough. She either needed a longer blade or a deeper, brighter shade of blood. Maybe there weren’t enough organs exposed. Opening up her lover’s gut to reveal the intestines was so cliche and messy. If she hadn’t worked in labs for so many years, a fecal failure would infect the beautiful blood. Of course she wasn’t going to consume it, but it had to spread smoothly, so each wisp of flame looked liked heart-spilled passion soaking into the black canvas. Unless they used luminol on her paintings, no one would detect the deadly fire hanging on her walls and the walls of the galleries contracting her for showings was previously oxygenated life-support fluid.

She wasn’t always like this. Her life and career was happy for a time. She had many novel years of experiences which were appealing, and one could say, satisfying. Being with a man and then a woman who indulged her lustful and raging sexual deviances was all she asked for. This lifestyle, accompanied by a fairly good bench job at a highly-touted medical facility kept her resources abundant enough for travel, play and extravagance.

But it all became so tedious.

She didn’t grow up learning that materials made you happy, or that your personal failures could be hidden behind slightly unacceptable social habits. No, it became too much to handle and she couldn’t contain the quotidian burn any longer. Her daily reality, her every breath, remained unsatisfied. Inside, there were moments when it warmed her, keeping her comfortably at home, but the sizzle had finally reached her heart. The skull no longer contained her chilling depths and the null and numb sensations even voided physical intimacy with the sun.

Her lover was such an easy target. Comfortably close to her, yet not open with others, no one would know he was gone. She didn’t live by a murderous, ethical code and wasn’t fully convinced of evil or depravity scales, behavioral analysis, psychobiological causation or criminalistics. Her actions were simply explained. As much as she needed to breath or eat, shit or sleep, love or hate, believe or dream, she needed to kill. There wasn’t a reasonable philosophy, natural excuse or metaphysical force, it was only her, and she was clever and well-versed enough to remain innocent.

Just take him, for example. Publicly-ridiculed and avoided, wanton for friendship, with interests to repel even the geekiest, serial-killer-loving, WoW-playing, industrial-aggro-listening riot grrrl or nerdcore banger. He stuck out like a pimple, ready to pop if any dared apply pressure. A social outcast on the verge of thinking what he enjoyed was avant garde. Lure him in with a little personal affection for his superficially dark interests and slice – all hers.

She easily picked up pointers on the most effective methods of anatomical disposal and investigative avoidance from the web, television, films, books, case studies, trial-and-error dissections funded by the NIH, criminology courses and common sense. She donned the decimation techniques of the greats – hydrofluoric acid, wood chipper, hungry pigs, drowned pieces, bleach, consumption, incineration. Oh, that was the easy part. Her technique at visual evasion while doing it was harder to come by. Having a location and plan for transport was her systemic symptom. Should she use a sedative, or knock out and tie down? Should she select a human body she could manhandle, or womanhandle, for that matter? Should it be in a remote location, where all the appeasement and seduction could be done at one time? All the vocational instruments of predatory seduction fit into her Joeyal Chinese rucksack. It was her task to keep it simple and accessible, quick and surprising.

Her lover was surprised to say the least. As soon as he awoke and found himself tied to a myrtle tree with twisted strand upon twisted strand of nylon rope, his eyes darted from shadow-to-shadow as she stared from behind the tree directly facing him. It was dark, but the tapetum lucidum, spectral range-enhanced recording she was making provided the artistic vision she would use as inspiration for next week’s session of flaming-tossing canvas-smearings. She needed to see the fear, the emotion of helplessness she felt when she wasn’t able to feed her own body’s desire and insatiable thirst for the last gasp. Not her last gasp, but his, of course.

She had gotten so good at the quick kill she didn’t need light. On this occasion she might leave the body, let the wolves tear him down to digestible size. Why would he even consider coming out here with her? She told him she found a “righteous instance only the Eastern Kingdoms could encompass,” an old fallout shelter in a forest just outside the city. He devoured it. Their walk was short, he was out of his element, and a quick bludgeoning put him out long enough for a quick, clove, hitch-lariat loop she’d been practicing – hard to knot, easy to release. No lights, no people, no one to hear his tangled yelps if she’d given him the chance to scream for a savior.

But there was always a chance, and she kept this in mind.

Part of the flame driving her prescribed to particular physical laws and it kept her rooted. No traditional psycho- or socio-pathic self-indulgence and egotism. The first few blood lets of her career were fantastical ventures of emotion and orgasm, overwhelming any logic or reason protecting her from capture. If she had been out in the woods, her fluids would have been found during those kills. Luckily, she planned and kept it all in-house, yet rolled in the blood, massaged her lovers’ stratum basale on her face and vagina, and lost one of the eyes for a week. It had rolled underneath a pile of blood-soaked sponges she used for canvas-dabbing. It was messy, cliche included.

Tonight, her lover’s disposal was an easy choice – keep the identifiable anatomy and bones, and leave as much soft tissue to the beasts of the night. She might find use for the bones, but the head, finger and toe prints, tattoo – because he happened to have ink of a Worgen, ironic isn’t it? – hair and nails needed to go with her. Sure, they’d have a DNA match within a matter of weeks, if anything was left by the pack, but the odds weren’t in his favor. He would be fully consumed and she would acidly deteriorate the other chunks and segments. The best, last and rest of whatever was left would be taken care of by incineration. Being an artist and lab tech with access to some major hardware always had its protective perks.

She turned on an LED lantern to see the struggle rather than hide in the obvious serial depth, and could see his eyes full of anger. It wasn’t the fear she recorded and had expected on approach. Maybe her lover had some latent qualities she dismissed early on, though she couldn’t image that to be true. If he were given any brief opportunity to touch her, she felt it might be the last, most violent touch she would ever experience. No such contact would be given, plus, she was all too concerned with the fatal event, with how to extinguish the fire pulsating through her aorta and burning deep in her heart. It was always at this point when mind and body would quarrel. How should she do it? Rationalize his end, or indulge the brutality and languish in his utter demise? Nothing dirty. Maybe she should use the puukko she picked up in Finland. Or the sharpfinger she inherited from her father. She also had on hand a fantastic straight-grind blade handmade for her in Guangdong. It would be a smooth entry, with a jagged outro if she managed to slip it in to the handle, which was unguarded and protected by some feisty spinal serrations. Yes, that would be the instrument of death and cause some splatter and spray to lead the pack – which had been howling about for minutes not too far off – to her lover. She could be quick with her vivisection, so a little she red bloody messy felt righteous enough to be left this fine, howl of a night.

Lost in My Own Happiness

What Was His Name Again?

For Jeff.

The ideas float around like clockwork but are rarely explained properly. Worse than free-floating in uncertainty is the crypsis of ideology. Not knowing what to say and not feeling what should be known seems to be a common problem for people who compare themselves to anyone else. Or so this is how he inspired me to not avoid interaction.

I spoke with a man today. He is an artist and a script writer. His hairdo is a careless pilsner, bangs pushed vertically upward by his left hand and rubber-band-wrapped wrist. He has one of those androgynous names, intriguing but common if thought about for too long. When he walks he doesn’t just step along – his gait is lazy, slightly bow-legged and most noticeable at the seat of his pants. The thick, black, plastic frames of his Holly’s give his eyes an educated appearance, but the calm and embrace of his gaze is of a silly layman. Most attractive is his mouth. Set in a strong, square jaw, he composed a broken, hesitant verbiage – the words of a painter.

While his appearance intrigued me, his meaning overwhelmed me as an aged reflectance of myself. I felt comfortable in his presence, even seeking shelter in conversation with him to avoid the stiff competition of mass ignorance. At times his point was hard to fully comprehend but I still sought after it while performing repetitive restock motions with my hands. He lifted my thoughts away from the floor of consumer transit – only acting itself out to make me oppose it even more.

We spoke for minutes on end. His words would occasionally be interrupted by my own thoughts, though his words were nonetheless important. During this moment I noticed he was wearing the same red and blue striped shirt and black pants as the week before. His black athletic shoes reflected novelty, but it may have been my lack of attention to them the last time I saw him. I wondered if his recycled wardrobe was small compared to most people, because painting was his life, death and style rolled into one complete personality which meant no need for self-presentation.

He mentioned this week he had been scared. The week before he said he was looking for a way to get fired and in my imagination I schemed an entire scenario to help him along. But this week there was no need for plan A. He said he was afraid because he was giving up painting, only to fall back into its clutches like any artist looking for another way to delve deeper into an unconscious. It is kind of like now – a mental state where the most fresh and primal urges embody themselves as a formation of creative ability. It is a neomission in the works, though none of us know it until it is complete.

This may be the strangest part of my admission, but I fell in love with him. Not in an intimate, sexual way, but more with his humanity and inspiration over me. If I were to select a personality for the painters Jackson Pollock or Pablo Picasso, or the writers Ernest Hemingway and Walt Whitman, it would represent his body and words, working together to convey his true heart and mind.

I decided I wanted to sketch him through words. I secretly hoped he might be able to sketch our interaction on a canvas in figures and shapes I could never create by my hand. Our words and images could combine to insist on a clear explanation for our interactions, artist-to-artist, man-to-man, lover-to-lover and human-to-human. I can still see his face shifting from straight and narrow – a serious emotion – to melancholy – his own word, but not without an err of humor. At this he would smile, only briefly but long enough for me to respect and admire where his mind would take me next.

At the end of our day he thanked me for talking with him and “hanging out.” It was more than my pleasure and a simple, pure excuse to write about one of the last remaining reasons to live in happiness – experiencing people. Not a human by any other name but an actual person I could rely on to feel and know the world as I do. These days it is a rare occurrence to meet someone stable enough to know they are unstable and stable at the same time; it is a matter of who you ask. If he asks me, I say both. And if I ask him I would say, “Shannon, can you love me as a person lost in their own happiness?” I have no doubt he would say yes.